


Mistakes Were Made

by Timjan



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M, White House era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 18:56:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14939961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Timjan/pseuds/Timjan
Summary: The first anniversary of his broken engagement was obviously never going to be a great day for Tommy. Thanks to Favs – probably intentionally, Tommy suspected – extending his birthday celebrations over the whole weekend, it ended up a lot better than it could have been. It was the dayafterthat truly sucked.





	Mistakes Were Made

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Tommy being a dork in [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1sSL_BxWkU) video.
> 
> Secret = safe and all that.

The first anniversary of his broken engagement was obviously never going to be a great day for Tommy. Thanks to Favs – probably intentionally, Tommy suspected – extending his birthday celebrations over the whole weekend, it ended up a lot better than it could have been. It was the day _after_ that truly sucked.

On June 7, 2010, Tommy was woken up by his Blackberry ringing. The first thing he saw was the curve of the back of a head covered in tightly shorn hair. Was he in Favs bed? _With_ Favs? God, what had happened last night? Well, figuring that out would have to wait, apparently. Tommy reached for his phone, responsibly propped up on Favs’ nightstand, and answered with a groggy “Hello?”

“Good morning, Vietor,” chirped the voice of a Washington Post reporter that Tommy was on friendly-ish terms with, but _not_ in the habit of getting phone calls from at half past five in the morning. “Rough night?”

There was a sort of humorous implication in the tone in which the question was asked that set Tommy on edge. He had developed a nose for that kind of thing, and right now it smelled like ‘I know something that you don’t know and I think it’s pretty funny.’ He sat up in Favs bed, rested his head against the fancy headboard.

“How come?” he said, answering a question with a question, trying to sound a little more awake than he had at first.

“There’s something you should probably know before you go into work today,” the reporter said ominously, “and I’ve decided I don’t see any reason not to let you know. So I’ll give you the scoop. Consider it a personal favor.”

One that he was sure to try to cash in on sooner or later.

Tommy hummed noncommittally. “So, what to do you have for me?”

The reporter told him. Tommy managed not to curse out loud.

\---

Wake up call ended, Tommy threw his phone down on the bed, making it bounce in a very satisfying way. Favs had woken up as Tommy spoke, and was now looking up at Tommy through dark eyelashes. He had a piece of sleep gunk stuck in them, and Tommy got a mad, mad impulse to carefully brush it away with a fingertip, as he might once have done for Katie.

“How much of that did you hear?” Tommy asked instead, turning his head to look up at Favs’ enviably high ceiling.

“Not much. I need coffee to kick my eavesdropping skills into proper gear.”

“Did you notice someone taking pictures of us yesterday?”

“No? Oh, fuck, what did they get?”

“Flip cup.”

Favs groaned the kind of groan that Tommy had managed to forcefully stop himself from making during his phone call, and Tommy took some vicarious pleasure from it.

“Yeah, I know. This will be a damage control kind of day.”

“Mhm. You’ve gotta call Gibbs. And Axe. I’ll get us some sort of breakfast. And coffee. And Advil.”

Tommy hummed, Blackberry already back in his hand. Favs scrambled out of bed, and Tommy did _not_ look at his ass covered only in a pair of blue boxers, but even if he _had_ that wouldn’t have been weird because he’d seen Favs’ ass thousands of times before and it had never been weird then.

\---

Somehow Tommy managed to find some time between his very embarrassing phone calls to his seniors that he didn’t want to disappoint and Favs’ return from his breakfast run to take a quick, cold shower that at least marginally cleared his head. Then he hurried to get dressed. It felt very important that he should be wearing clothes when Favs returned. Tommy always kept a suit at Favs place, together with the slightly-too-small pair of dress shoes that he hadn’t gotten around to returning in time and two pairs of clean underwear. The suit was a somber dark grey, chosen to work for almost any situation, and rifling through Favs’ drawers Tommy completed his look with a white shirt, a nondescript blue-grey-ish tie and matching nondescript blue-grey-ish socks. He was just dropping yesterday’s clothes in Favs’ laundry basket when he heard the apartment door slammed shut.

“I come bringing bagels!” Favs announced. “And I’ve made sure that there are no reporters lurking outside. Seems we don’t quite warrant paparazzi stakeouts yet.”

Tommy chuckled, but he also sent up a quick prayer of thanks. He didn’t want to know what kind of spin the republican blogosphere would put on him and Favs leaving Favs’ apartment together the morning after they’d been caught in a shirtlessly compromising position together at Old Glory. It would probably have put even Lovett’s worst insinuations to shame.

\---

Over a breakfast of Advil, bagels and coffee, Tommy took it upon him to finally acknowledge the elephant that had courteously stepped to the side of the room as he dealt with the more pressing emergency. Not that the situation wasn’t uncommonly awkward already, or at least weirdly unbalanced, with Tommy dressed up for work and Favs in basketball shorts and a t-shirt. Tommy wondered idly if it made Favs feel naked, and then immediately compartmentalized that thought away into a mind cabinet labeled ‘NOPE.’

“So, how come I woke up in your bed and not the guest room?” Tommy asked.

Favs glanced over at him, teeth sunk deep into a bagel. The sleep gunk was gone from his eyelashes now, Tommy noticed.

“Jeez, you don’t remember? How drunk were you?” he said once he’d swallowed his bagel bite, in a tone that at least got points for trying for teasing.

Tommy had indeed gotten truly pissed the night before, in an attempt to avoid thinking about how he _should_ have been at a fancy restaurant, drinking some fine wine that Katie had picked out and looking deeply into her eyes. He’d trusted Favs to take care of him. And he had. To the point of tucking him into bed and then crawling in after him, apparently. The thought made Tommy blush.

“Just tell me what happened,” he said.

Jon didn’t blush as easily as Tommy, but he was embarrassed as well, Tommy could tell. He was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, head tilted downwards. Then he looked back up at Tommy and – unconsciously, it seemed – rubbed a hand over his mouth, his fingers slowly stretching out his bottom lip and then letting it go so that his mouth snapped shut with an obscene little ‘pop’ as his fingers moved on over the stubble on his chin. _Jesus_. Tommy looked away.

“Well, uh,” Jon said, “we got home and I gave you a glass of water and told you to go brush your teeth and you kept saying ‘I wish I had a dog, I wish I had a dog’ and then some things about Katie, and, uh, some things about your dad… and I figured you wouldn’t want to be alone.”

“Christ. I didn’t, like, try anything weird, right?” Tommy said, and then, realizing how that had sounded, he quickly added, “I mean, like rubbing your belly or calling you a ‘good boy’?”

It was only after he’d spoken that Tommy realized that ‘good boy’ wasn’t just something people said to dogs and felt his cheeks flame up. Thankfully, Favs just laughed the whole thing off.

\---

When Tommy and Favs arrived at the White House, the two of them were ushered into a meeting room where most of the press team was already assembled, ready to grill Tommy and Favs about their activities the night before so they could prepare a statement. They’d even called in Anita Dunn, who greeted the two of them with a brisk,

“Okay, so, a photo is already up at a site called FamousDC, and we expect other sites to pick up on the story soon enough. If it gains traction it’ll get off the internet, and the mainstream media will have to do something with it too. Either way we’ll need a statement, so get cracking.”

Dunn turned over her laptop so Tommy and Favs could see the post at FamousDC. Tommy’s eyes went instantly to the picture. It was… not as bad as he had feared. Pretty boring, really, just a group of friends standing around a table. To be honest, Tommy found his douch-y shades-indoors-look to be more objectionable than the fact that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Then he noticed the helpful arrows pointing out ‘Tommy Vietor’ and ‘Favs’ and had to stifle a snigger. It was more difficult to stifle the blush that he felt creeping up his neck as he glanced at Jon’s pixilated bared pectorals, though – which was weird, because as late as the day before, he had obviously seen them, well, _in the flesh_ , and they hadn’t made him blush then. Still, here he was, and there was nothing to be done except to look away and think of dirty socks and the smell of wet wool.

“Hey, they say we were playing beer pong,” Favs pointed out, apparently scanning the text rather than the picture.

“Weren’t you?” Axe asked.

“No, but…” Favs began.

“Right, then that’s the statement,” Dunn cut in. “‘Contrary to what’s been reported, the staffers were not playing the drinking game known as ‘beer pong’.’”

“But we _were_ playing…” Favs began again.

This time, Tommy cut him off.

“Leave it, Favs, this is how this is done,” he said with a sigh.

Half truths and omissions was Tommy’s stock of trade these days, and this wasn’t the first time he envied Favs for getting to use his words to create something beautiful and inspirational rather than something designed to be as flat and meaningless as possible.

“So, that’s the drinking game,” Dunn said. “Now, _please_ give me a good explanation for why you weren’t wearing shirts. Indoors.”

\---

All in all, things went about as well as one could hope for for the first day of a semi-scandal. The mainstream media seemed to decide that two twenty-something dudes having fun on a day off wasn’t, in fact, all that newsworthy, but still about half of the calls and emails that Tommy got from reporters that day  were about him personally, which was a novelty he could have lived without, frankly. At least only one photo had been published that far. Tommy’s friend at the Washington Post had mentioned several pictures – ‘most of them are very blurry but it’s clearly you and Mr. Favreau in at least three of them’ – so he spent the whole day worrying that more would show up.

Tommy hadn’t exactly felt on top of things when he got in that morning, and as the day went on he got more and more slow and sluggish. He had a headache lurking right behind his temples at all times, ready to spring out if he made any quick movements or concentrated too hard on something complicated, like how to communicate that there wasn’t really anything that the President could personally do about the goddamn oil spill. And he was sure that normally no one would have begrudged him being a little hung-over on the Monday after celebrating his best friend’s birthday, but the fact that he’d added an unnecessary complication to their job in an already trying time made his colleagues a little short with him all day. He snapped back at them, the way he couldn’t allow himself to snap at the reporters – not today – and ended up giving Ben an earful about Sudan that he didn’t really deserve and that Tommy knew he’d had to apologize about the next day.

It didn’t help Tommy’s mood that he kept obsessive tabs on himself and Favs on the Google news search, and it took all the self-control he had for him to not try to find out who the master photographer behind the whole conundrum was. (He had contacts; he probably could have if he tried. He had a fair guess of the type to first recognize and then nark on two Obama staffer on a night out: some republican think thank wannabe, new enough in town not to follow the unwritten live-and-let-live rules of the Washington night life.) It also didn’t help that whenever Tommy let his mind drift for a moment, he found himself imagining letting his hands slide down Jon’s warm, naked torso as a precursor to doing things that would give Tommy a reason to actually call him a ‘good boy’ after all. _Jesus._ You wake up in bed with someone and suddenly all you can think about is sleeping with them. At least his bad mood gave Tommy a legit excuse to avoid Favs all day. And at least he was thinking way less about Katie than he would have thought possible only two days ago.

\---

By the time Tommy had gone to leave his too-small dress shoes outside Favreau’s office and put on sneakers to go home, no other pictures had shown up, and no serious publication had posted about the Sunday’s shirtless shenanigans either, so Tommy’s mood had already tentatively improved. It rose even more when he got a text from Lovett telling him that he’d bought Thai food for both of them. Lovett was one of the people that Tommy had managed to avoid all day at the White House, but there was of course no avoiding him at home – and Tommy didn’t want to either. Lovett was the best.

The day before, when Tommy had spent the morning moping about, muttering things like ‘I can't believe I flew out to fucking Paris, what kind of fucking idiot...’ under his breath, Lovett had made time to make sympathetic noises and telling him he was too hard on himself, even though he’d had a deadline coming up and wouldn’t even have time to come along to Favs’ celebrations that night (he’d been at the proper party the night before, of course). He’d even kept listening when Tommy’s vitriol pivoted from self-deprecation to attacks on Katie. Lovett had never really known Katie, and god knew he had large enough vitriol reserves of his own, so Tommy felt free to say things to him that would have made Favs give him that look that said ‘I understand that you say these things as a way to cope and I would never judge you for it but if I ever caught myself even thinking that kind of thing I would be deeply disappointed in myself.’ Or maybe Tommy was projecting a little bit. In any case he preferred saying these things to Lovett, who would either agree so vehemently and nonsensically that Tommy saw how ridiculous he was being or share his own horror tales of the gay DC dating scene.

When Tommy got home Lovett was sprawled out on the sofa, laptop propped up on his stomach. Tommy caught a glimpse of a mostly empty Word document with a header reading ‘Super important energy speech that people will absolutely definitely care about’ before Lovett snapped the lid shut and sat up to beam at Tommy.

“I saw the pic,” he said by way of greeting.

“Yeah? What did you think?”

“I mean, waaaay less salacious than I’d been led to hope for, really.”

Tommy laughed, the worry and annoyance of his day slowly starting to drain out of him.

“Sorry that we didn’t fulfill all your fantasies, Lovett,” he shot back, still chuckling.

“An apology is worth nothing unless it comes with a promise to do better.”

“I take back my apology, then.”

“Spoil sport!”

Tommy laughed again as he went into the kitchen to grab the container of Thai food that Lovett had promised him by way of text. Lovett really was the best. Only Favs could really compete when it came to helping Tommy wind down. Thinking about Jon for some reason made Tommy contemplate the fact that the easy banter that he’d just shared with Lovett easily could be construed as flirting. Which wasn’t a totally new realization; it had just never bothered Tommy before. He’d put that lack of bother down to being secure in his sexuality, but… Well. He might as well ask.

“Hey, Lovett,” he yelled as he put a plate of lukewarm khao phat into the microwave, “Er… how did you know you were into guys?”

**Author's Note:**

> This weird little Tommy character study comes to you from my realization that the Flip Cup Incident took place exactly one year after Tommy proposed to Katie. The Vietreau snuck in of its own volition...
> 
> I experiment with fandom engagement on [tumblr](https://abriefshoutouttosomeminutiae.tumblr.com/).


End file.
